One morning,
the valley began to rumble,
yes it did.
One morning
the valley began to shake,
and
there was a mighty
moving around.
On that morning, Franklin sang, Ezekiel “saw the old dry bones / in motion,” and the New Bethel congregation exploded with a joyous exultation of faith rewarded. C. L., in full whoop, in key, with his message focused, chanted the skeletal bones back toward wholeness, much as the prophet had. The foot bone searched out an ankle, which in turn found the knee bone, and then the thigh and the hip bones, “moving toward back bones,” to the shoulder, the neck, and finally the head, redeeming the bones from desolation, creating from a fractured hopelessness the possibility of human wholeness. All the while this prophet’s voice “kept on preaching, / ‘O ye dry bones / hear the word of the Lord.’”
With the congregation nearly overcome by the hurt of the joy within, Franklin explained what happened next. As God created the flesh to cover the bones that were, as yet, but lifeless corpses, he ordered the prophet to
Turn now
and preach to the wind.
Tell the wind
that God wants the wind to blow,
. . . and blow breath into these bodies.
Twenty-nine times in his conclusion, Franklin chanted of God’s “words” or his “Word,” the ultimate protection against the wrenching despair Ezekiel suffered. Human efforts were important, C. L. reiterated, but they may pass away while “his word will always stand.” And when these earthly trials are over, “when I get on to the [River] Jordan, / I want his Word right there”:
I want him to let his Word
be shaped like a vessel
and let my so-o-ul
o-o-o-ohh, step on over.
This was the faith that could transform a valley of dry bones—indeed, transform anything.41
Beatrice Buck, the secretary to the owner of the Gotham Hotel before she became C. L.’s secretary in 1956, poignantly described her reaction to Franklin’s sacred performance. C. L.’s message “gave me something to think about . . . to strive for, it gave me new, renewed faith in God, and I do believe in God.” The biblical stories themselves, interpreted through the voice of this majestic preacher, told “of the struggles that somebody had been into or some biblical person, and how they came out of it. It also taught me how prayer changes things.” Reverend Jerome Kirby, who joined New Bethel as a child in the late 1940s, soon after his family arrived from Arkansas, emphasized as well that Franklin’s message emboldened many southern migrants. His proclamation of faith’s meaning in human history and his pointed avowal of an alternative understanding of the black experience in America, made Franklin, Kirby thought, “a link to the [civil rights] movement.” Here, in the joined power of his ideas and their delivery, men and women rose to new life.42
All of Franklin’s efforts at self-education (he was again taking college classes in Detroit, at Wayne State) never erased his poignant awareness of the command of words and ideas regularly exhibited by an A. A. Banks or a Jesse Jai McNeil. Franklin did not doubt his power from the pulpit; he was just too smart a man not to know his weaknesses. As a result, he sought out Reuben Gayden, a boyhood acquaintance (and now a good friend) from Cleveland, Mississippi. Gayden’s father, J. W. Gayden, had led St. Paul’s Missionary Church in Cleveland between 1926 and 1935, when Rachel and C. L. attended St. Peter’s Rock. The younger Gayden also became a minister and dean of the School of Religion at Natchez College, where he developed a reputation as a brilliant interpreter of theology and biblical studies. Never able to retain a pulpit for long—his rather dry preaching style disappointed, and even when married, he enjoyed other women and his liquor too much for most congregations—Gayden focused on his intellectual work. That occupation also led to difficulties as he veered sharply from Baptist orthodoxy, questioning literalism at every turn, so much so that even some theologically liberal ministers thought him suspect.43
Franklin organized an ongoing study group in his home during the 1950s that lasted more than a decade and invited Gayden to lead the weekly seminar. Gayden was in constant need of money, and the collection Franklin raised from the ministers who attended provided some steady income. For C. L., this seminar was not unlike the Tuesday ministers’ meetings in Memphis. These Detroit preachers shared ideas, discussed effective techniques for presenting a sermon, and enjoyed one another’s company. As in Memphis, these meetings were well known to both other ministers and parishioners, and many ministers desperately hoped for an invitation. But now one man guided the discussions. Gayden usually presented a biblical text, examined its historical setting, and explored its theological meaning from a variety of viewpoints, as a prelude to a general discussion. Gayden gave his students “nuggets for sermons,” Jasper Williams noted, which they individually developed. When Franklin entered the pulpit, then, working from a brief outline rather than a prepared manuscript, someone who knew Gayden might well have recognized aspects of his thinking in Franklin’s words, though the sermon itself was distinctly C. L. in its narrative structure, style of delivery, and message.44
This was indeed the case with “Without a Song,” which completes the central group of sermons that contain the major themes in C. L.’s preaching in this era. In this sermon he took for his text the opening four verses of the 137th Psalm, where the Israelites, sitting “by the rivers of Babylon . . . wept when we remembered Zion.” The Babylonians desired an amusement from their captives, to have them perform “one of the songs of Zion” as a diversion to pass the time. Captive and despondent, with their sacred songs mocked, Israel uttered the pained cry of the oppressed down through the millennia: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”45
The subject that evening, C. L. announced, was “Without a Song.” “These proud Hebrews in Babylon” were teachers, scholars, government officials, and rabbis, Franklin explained, and the Babylonians required of them a song as an amusement, an entertainment for their captors. Given that context, the Israelites refused, thinking the request “untimely” and “out of place. . . . Said they, ‘How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?’”
Franklin disagreed. The Israelites should have sung, he argued, perhaps especially Zion’s songs, for song has a universal appeal that can convey “many messages.” C. L. turned then to the first of three interrelated historical sketches that explored the promise and potency of song. He talked of the West Indies, probably of Jamaica, where “some of the inhabitants of the country,” colonial subjects of a European power, used song in electoral campaign rallies to raise issues concerning independence they could not discuss openly from the platform. He recalled a favorite saying of his, paraphrasing W. H. Brewster, “Some things you can’t say, you can sing. Isn’t that so?” and called on the congregation to affirm in their response one of the deepest truths in African American folk culture.
His second vignette shifted the focus to Europe. Some time before the Nazi assumption of power in Germany in 1933, Roland Hayes, the Georgia-born African American tenor, walked onto a stage in one of Berlin’s opulent concert halls. Infuriated at the presence of this non-Aryan, Nazis and their sympathizers in the audience “went into howls and hisses to make it impossible for him to sing.” Hayes stood there, “with his eyes closed and his arms folded,” the dissonance intensifying until, finally, arms still folded and eyes still shut, he began to sing, “Lord, thou art my peace, thou art my peace.” In C. L.’s retelling, this “great voice” soared above the insults, quieted the raucous hall, and Hayes completed his concert. “I’m trying to tell you,” C. L. stressed again, “what can be done in a song.”
He drove his message home, drawing directly on his people’s experience in the United States. Slaves were frequently “called upon to sing” by masters, and despite the conditions they endured, they “never missed a chance to sing.” This was not simply a reflection of the white master�
�s power, nor was it confirmation of the master’s image of the purported childlike innocence of “their” slaves. Rather, Franklin taught, finger jabbing at the podium as the congregation responded fervently, the slave sang “because it was his songs and the gospel he heard by those ancient ministers that kept hope alive in his heart.” Under the very eyes of their captors, the slaves sang for themselves, of their fundamental commitment to survive, expressing as they did an alternative vision of Christianity, its relationship to slavery, and the meaning of the term master. “I think they should have sung,” C. L. reiterated.46
Franklin then called by name the work of the African American folklorist Miles Mark Fisher, who recorded the tale told from one generation to the next of an “old woman,” a slave named Mary, “in the Carolinas or in Georgia,” who attended a revival during the eighteenth century’s major religious awakening preached by Charles Wesley, the English Methodist preacher. So many whites had crowded into the small chapel that slaves were barred from their traditional place in the balcony and listened from outside, through open windows. When Wesley finished and the call went out for those ready to accept Jesus to come forward, Mary “walked in the front door . . . down the aisle, and took a seat to join the church.” The local pastor confronted her: “Lady, you can’t join this church.” Perplexed, but trusting the spirit of her conversion, Franklin’s Mary responded: “But sir, I got ’eligion. I’ve been converted. I felt the power of God here today while the man preached, and I want to jine the church.” The pastor remained adamant, and as Mary returned down the aisle, tears streaming across her cheeks, she mumbled to herself, “‘I’m going to tell God one of these days how you treat me.’” At this point her fellow slaves, still at the windows, created a song that centuries later still carried one of the deepest expressions of hope in African American culture:
Oh Mary, don’t weep, don’t mourn;
Pharaoh’s army got drownded;
Mary, don’t weep, and then don’t mourn.
That God’s providence would in time drown even as powerful an opponent as the Egyptian army on behalf of one as seemingly insignificant as Mary was the psychological foundation of a sense of self profoundly different from what the dominant society expected from its slaves. “Think of the message that is wrapped up in that song,” Franklin exhorted. “I think that everybody ought to have a song. I think that Israel should have sung down in Babylon.”47
Captivity can be oppressive, C. L. preached, but even the worst oppressor “can’t keep me from dreaming . . . [or] from singing.” The young boy who did just that as he worked the cotton fields close by Highway 61 now affirmed, with his mature voice, a future where “one of these days, a chariot is going to swing low for me.” Lest anyone confuse that enigmatic phrase, “one of these days,” with passivity, C. L. immediately reminded the congregation that slaves had gathered illegally, outside the presence of whites, for their own religious services. White masters opposed such gatherings, C. L. instructed, not because they were antireligious or because they wished to deny to slaves religious expression. Rather, the masters “feared that this congregating would create unity and give rise to thoughts of liberation, and so they forbade them, in many cases, to congregate.”48
Among the colonial people of the Afro-Caribbean world, as for African Americans confronting the stark evil of European or American racism, to sing a song through the darkness, the trials, and the tribulations was simultaneously a spiritual and a political act—one that trusted, Franklin thought, in the providence of God acting through individuals to effect their salvation and their liberation. The portraits he painted—the Moses in each individual; the courage of Roland Hayes; the sustaining faith of Ezekiel; the eagle soaring toward freedom; and Mary, the black everywoman, before whom even Pharaoh’s armies ultimately faltered—were calculated to call individuals, preoccupied with daily affairs or floundering under racism’s pervasive impact, to a new, more self-conscious expression and engagement. Hinken Perry, another Mississippi native, a New Bethel member for half a century, a deacon for almost four decades, and an autoworker and union member for thirty-four years, was one of many for whom Franklin’s message reverberated. “Well,” Deacon Perry explained, Reverend Franklin would “often talk about the importance of the political. We can’t live without politics, so he kind of brought politics right along with religion, because both of ’em was important. We live in a political world. We have to be involved.”49
To Franklin, this was biblical Israel’s mistake. In not singing, in not giving voice to their vision even in captivity, Israel remained “hampered by her nationalistic thinking . . . by many inhibitions that were inherent in [her] culture.” Their intent was nationhood, in a promised land beyond the boundaries of their captors. Thus the Israelites could refuse to sing before their captors because their covenant with God foretold of their deliverance into the Promised Land. They were sojourners in Babylon, atoning perhaps for a lack of past faith but assured that Yahweh their God would deliver them. Inclusion into Babylonian political life, even if possible, was not the goal.50
Like the Israelites, African Americans were a covenanted people, chosen by their God and weighted with the responsibilities of that relationship, and they did inhabit a strange land. But the circumstances of their involuntary migration into another’s promised land created a different historical experience. For African Americans, their passage from Africa to the proclaimed New Israel of America was a passage into Egypt, into oppression, into captivity. The exodus theme remained central; but as both enslaved and free men and women, black Americans identified deeply with pre-deliverance Israel. In song and folktale, as in sermons and public speeches, the sharpness of this difference cut to the very core of their judgment on the American experiment. To the degree that the nation curtailed blacks’ freedom, it violated its own covenant.
African Americans were, in a profound manner, also home, even in their captivity. The identification with the Israelites of old aided immeasurably in the development of a sense of peoplehood, but for most, that collective consciousness was not tied to the creation of an independent nation state. There was no realization of another promised land akin to the sustained Zionist movement among Jews; nor, except for a small group, was a biblical text such as the 137th Psalm the foundation for a religio-political imperative to remove to Africa, as it was among Rastafarians throughout Afro-Caribbean culture. In C. L.’s vision, African Americans were not dispossessed wanderers and therefore could not afford the luxury of remaining silent. So they should sing—to recognize themselves as a group, to develop perspective, to organize to change the very society that oppressed and, just maybe, the oppressor. It was a strange land, but it was their land nonetheless. He knew that to sing of what might not yet be possible to say would bring the day much closer when that metaphorical chariot of many meanings would, indeed, “swing low for me.”51
Most who heard him live or on records, Franklin reflected later in his career, knew little about the Bible beyond “limited excerpts.” His detailed biblical descriptions were the gateway through which audiences could place themselves in a historical continuum. In the face of persistent criticism from some members that he had strayed from the traditional emphasis on Jesus as personal savior, Franklin maintained his approach. “You just preach about Jesus sometimes,” he said. “But then you preach about some other things.” He had “one foot in that older tradition,” Reverend Bernard Lafayette thought. But he possessed as well “a black consciousness” of his people’s history. He was “the apex of the bridge” between the two traditions.52
Franklin’s efforts did not cease when he left the pulpit, sermon finished. On a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1954, for example, James and Grace Lee Boggs, two self-described Marxist revolutionaries, ascended to the pulpit at New Bethel Baptist Church. C. L. R. James, the West Indian Marxist theoretician, had emphasized the critical importance of the African independence struggles then in progress, and the Boggs’s small Detroit group concurred.
They produced a booklet on the struggle in Kenya and sought to have churches sponsor “Kenya Sundays” to discuss the issue. C. L. was the only Baptist minister and one of only three black ministers of any denomination whom the Boggses approached who welcomed their effort. This was but two years after the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Detroit, and the nation remained obsessed by a fierce campaign to root out Communists. The Mau Mau, Kenya’s revolutionary guerrilla soldiers and the image of armed, successful black African soldiers, touched a fear deeply imbedded in an American racialized consciousness. Franklin was not a political comrade of the Boggses. But he appreciated the importance of African independence and its meaning for black Americans, and he welcomed the couple to his church. Grace Lee Boggs recalled Franklin as one “of the most politically conscious preachers in Detroit” and remembered that she and her husband “sold more than four hundred copies of the Kenya booklet to members of New Bethel from the pulpit.”53
Franklin was not a political innocent, open to any and all winds that swirled about the corner of Hastings and Willis seeking a church welcome. But he gave his pulpit to anyone whom he thought had the best interests of his people at heart, regardless of whether he agreed with their analysis, and he almost never critiqued an individual by name from his pulpit, regardless of what he thought of their program. Still, he did not shy away from all debate. The first major issue he raised, in the mid-1950s, concerned the relationship between the Communist Party’s political vision and his analysis of human rights. C. L. framed the issue as a matter of faith. The question asked of the Pharisees in Jesus’ time was relevant “tonight, [for] New Bethel and Detroit” as well: “What do you think of Jesus?” Where the biblical question concerned whether the ancient Jews perceived Jesus’ lineage from the line of David (therefore making him human) or as “the Christ of God,” a central question before Franklin’s congregation that night “in this so-called Atomic Age” was, “What is your idea of a loyal citizen of America?” Since “Communism looms menacingly upon the horizons of these troubled times,” to define the meaning of loyalty “folk must take a stand, either for or against” Communism. There was as well another critical question that required attention, namely, one’s position on “human rights, not racial rights, human rights.” In contrast with Communism, which he treated as a domestic question, human rights were of international concern, as people throughout the world, regardless of “race, creed, or color,” demanded answers.54
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